Shaking My Head, the man says. Shaking my head cuz one day before the big scrimmage a chunk of the team attacked police and property outside a bar last night. This program, the man says.
But it isn’t just the program, right? Texas Tech is a university; a university whose current national rank is #176 , down twenty points from a couple of years ago. A real trailer park of a place, with violent tailgaters, sadistic coaches, 1500 current lawsuits from dismissed sadistic coaches, a freshman who a few weeks ago got annoyed and took his handgun out and blew the head off of a campus security guy, and, well, there’s jest a ton of stuff like that about this great Lubbock institution. Ask me about Alberto Gonzales!
So … shaking your head? You live in the world’s biggest academic shithole. There’s not enough room in all that shit to move your head, let alone shake it.
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UD thanks JND.
Mike Leach, Bobby Knight, Billy Gillispie – Texas Tech seems to choose only the most sadistic coaches for its players… Illegally, agonizingly, protracted practices; physical and psychological roughing up; verbal abuse– all of these men have had something on this list alleged against them. (Background here. Oh wait, that’s about TTU coach Tommy Tuberville’s multiple fraud schemes…. Here. Here. That last one explains why the local culture demands sadistic coaches.)
Texas Tech craves pain, whether from Alberto Gonzales or its, er, hit parade of coaches. When the players eventually leave or revolt, or when the newspapers get a whiff of the story, Texas Tech gets to increase the pain for everyone by firing the coach and then getting sued for millions and millions of dollars which will have to come from students and faculty.
This submissive’s latest dominant, Gillispie, came with irresistible credentials:
[Gillispie] faced similar issues following his departure from Kentucky, including from former Wildcat Josh Harrelson, who said Gillispie “once became so angered that he instructed him to sit in a bathroom stall during a halftime talk at Vanderbilt and then ordered him to ride back to Lexington in the Kentucky equipment truck.” Stories like that, and others about Gillispie’s careless attitude toward basketball office admins and staff, have damaged Gillispie’s reputation nearly beyond repair. His post-Kentucky arrest for drunken driving, Gillispie’s third since 1999, certainly doesn’t help.
Or, as TTU likes to put it: “Student-athlete well-being is our top priority.”
… [Football Coach Mike Leach] is the king of Lubbock. He’s bullied his administration numerous times over the last six or seven years. Leach and the school have bickered over his salary several times, and just last year the school president had to personally oversee Leach’s latest contract extension…
… Leach [has] revealed himself as dangerously irrational. He tried to sue Texas Tech so that he could coach “his” team in the bowl game. Are you kidding me? It’s not his team. It’s Texas Tech’s team…
All this, and Alberto Gonzales.
Plus they’ve got years of expensive litigation from the just-fired Leach to look forward to.
… Coach Mike Leach.
But cheer up, Red Raiders! You’ve still got Alberto Gonzales.
The New York Times Ethicist, Randy Cohen, asks whether Texas Tech was right to create a crony-mandated professorship for disgraced former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who will be teaching one course for $100,000.
Well, it’s a real brain twister, but Cohen comes up with the correct answer: No.
The only argument his defenders have is that it’s valuable for students to listen to someone who’s been there, at the heart of history, etc. Cohen responds that there’s a difference between people who happen to have been around when things were happening, and scholars able to reflect on those things:
A better way of studying Gonzales’s “direct hands-on involvement” in Washington would be for him to deliver a series of public lectures that students could subsequently analyze under the tutelage of actual scholars, who would earn in a year what Gonzales would be paid for one hypothetical hour of nostalgic palaver… Tech is paying him a lot of money to do a job for which he is unsuited. It was improper for the school to offer and indecorous for Gonzales to accept.
If this comment is true, all praise to the TTU law school:
[The chancellor] tried to foist the man off on the Law School. Three times he tried and three time the Law School—-both through its Dean and its Faculty (and perhaps with some help from its alums) rebuffed him. But the Law School has a bit more autonomy than does the Poly Sci Department.
Second, the ONLY good thing that can come from this bizarre appointment is that it gives the Board of Regents serious pause about continuing Hance as Chancellor…
The University of Illinois law school only had to keep unqualified students out…
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UD thanks a reader, jbb, for the link.
Alberto Gonzales, thoroughly disgraced Attorney General, will get $100,000 for teaching one course at Texas Tech.
No one who reads this blog will be surprised that, having exhausted efforts to find a higher paying job, a once-well-known person rigs a do-nothing deal at a university for a pretty fair sum. Even Michael Jackson’s doctors will eventually be taken up by some university to teach Medicine in the Age of Celebrity. Compared to the crumb bums who land on campuses after no one else will employ them, Gonzales is a saint.
Still, people outside Texas Tech are pretty outraged. There’s this guy, and there’s this guy, both of whom recount the new political science professor’s many outrageous misdeeds as Bush’s lackey at Justice.
Both writers also make much of Texas Tech having not long ago hired the psychotic Bobby Knight late in his psychotic career.
First guy: “The disgraced former official finally landed a job outside of government—he resigned in 2007 — and now (for one year anyway) will teach political science – ‘contemporary issues in the executive branch’ – at a school most recently known for hosting basketball coach Bobby Knight.”
Second guy: “Chancellor Hance’s unilateral hire constitutes academic welfare for a government wash-out. It is even more brazen than Texas Tech’s decision, in 2001, to sign Bobby Knight as its basketball coach, six months after he was fired from Indiana University for ‘uncivil, defiant, and unacceptable behavior.’ Before his invitation to lead the Red Raiders, Knight had repeatedly abused players, fans, and furniture, but, unlike Gonzales, the temperamental coach did not do violence to the authority and impartiality of American jurisprudence.”
See how sports decisions can play into your university’s academic reputation? The point both guys are making about Texas Tech as a university is clear: The place is clueless, cynical, and desperate enough to do just about anything.
Texas Tech must be seen to be believed. In this earlier post, UD surveyed the school’s long list of sadistic coaches – not to mention its bringing on board and giving all its money to luminaries like Alberto Gonzales and Tommy Tuberville – and concluded that something way kinky was going on there. It’s as if the place seeks after twisted people to hurt its students and its reputation.
Incredibly, this idea – that TTU actually recruits the sadistic as a kind of school policy – seems not so wild. For with all that sadomasochism behind it, TTU went and hired another one … or another two…
Twelve of the 21 women who played for Texas Tech since [Marlene] Stollings took over the program in 2018 have left, [citing player abuse]…. [Also, players accused] former strength and conditioning coach Ralph Petrella of berating and sexually harassing them … [Stollings has now also been fired.]
Luckily, assistant coach Nikita Lowry Dawkins is still there!
[One player reports she was] told by assistant coach Nikita Lowry Dawkins to snap a rubber band on her wrist when she had a negative thought.
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Plus you don’t have to be selected for a varsity team to get the shit beat out of you in Lubbock. Lubbock is one of America’s most violent cities. Just walk outside.
A commenter responds to Texas Tech coach Tommy Tuberville’s latest run-in with the law:
… Texas Tech head coach Tommy Tuberville has now been linked to two [fraud schemes] in the past year. Tuberville was listed as an investor in former Georgia coach Jim Donnan‘s “retail liquidation company”, GLC, which turned out to be a Ponzi scheme. Now, Tuberville is the subject of Huntsville Times report that lists him as the focal point of a fraud case involving an Auburn-based investment company.
What the commenter overlooks is that you can’t make TTU look bad, because TTU has been way, way worse than bad for years. Tuberville? Texas Tech recently announced that they’re raising his salary by $500,000. Good timing! He’s got a lot of investors to pay off! Plus attorneys to hire!
Texas Tech hired disgraced Attorney General Alberto Gonzales – paid him $100,000 to teach one course.
Texas Tech hired mad Mike Leach, then fired him when he allegedly concussed one too many players, and is now the object of an incredibly expensive lawsuit he filed against the school.
You don’t make sewers like TTU look bad.
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UD thanks Dave.
Texas Tech doesn’t need any more bad news. They’ve already got Mike Leach, Alberto Gonzales, and the Tornado of Ideas sculpture. Plus really drunk nasty tailgaters.
On the other hand, given all its trouble, the school is clearly becoming seasoned in the ways of disaster management. It has, for instance, taken down the web page of Rod Hicks, who has an endowed chair in the health sciences center, very quickly indeed.
It’s now trying to track Rod down, but although “TTUHSC asked Dr. Hicks to come home from Austin yesterday, … instead of coming home when planned he took a different flight. Our sources say the university was unable to locate him Friday.”
The Hicks embarrassment is very postmodern, very high-tech, very much about cutting-edge universities and faculties making use of the latest online teaching equipment.
KCBD reports:
… [Hicks] was instructing students this week from Austin via teleconference. We’re told that when the class ended, he left the video feed open. This is when students on the other side of the feed saw Hicks surfing for sexual material.
… We’ve learned through an open records request that Hicks was removed Thursday from his professorship of the endowed chair.
As of Friday afternoon, federal records do not show criminal charges of any kind but it is our understanding he may face civil and administrative penalties…
So he’s teaching via tv from Austin because whatever… Something better than his classroom in Lubbock is in Austin… It’s a summer class and maybe he’s summering in Austin… All he has to do is interrupt his surfing for an hour or so a couple of times a week to teach this class…
But that’s just the problem! When all of life is switching among screens (Hicks got his PhD online from Capella), it’s easy to forget that sometimes you’re not alone…
After all, September’s around the corner.
Tailgaters at this season’s Texas Tech football home games could see changes to the university’s alcohol policy and will have to seek alternative parking spots as the campus accommodates stadium construction.
A proposed change to the university’s alcohol policy would ban kegs from the campus…
… The university already bans alcoholic beverages from the campus, but Student Government Association President Suzanne Williams said that hasn’t stopped tailgaters in campus parking lots from consuming alcohol before and during football games.
“It’s become where policy and practice are very different things,” she said. “We’re trying to make sure the policy is up to the practice.”
Some reader comments:
I would be for anything that could bring some class to what has become a black eye for the University. I hear too many first hand reports of ill-treatment of visitors like vehicle vandalism,verbal confrontations of people wearing opposing jerseys from drunks and don’t forget the classless profanity laced altered fight song. I hear more people say that the Lubbock experience is just not worth the trip.
How about enforcing the rules you have now and throwing the drunks in jail. The TTU police have their hands tied because heaven forbid they throw the wrong guy (big donor) in jail…
… I’ve seen an older drunk Tech fan punch and knock down a sober opposing fan, just for cheering for his team. I’ve also had that turned towards me and my family. It was so bad that none of my family will go back to Jones for a game….
Here’s TTU’s problem. You want to keep them drunk enough not to notice that Alberto Gonzales is on the faculty earning $100,000 for teaching one course, but not so drunk that they attack visitors.